If insuring a jet were like insuring a car, you wouldn't need this article-or much help at all. You'd simply call your insurance agent, tell him what model you were buying, make a few quick decisions about coverage limits and be done with it.

Miami is often called the unofficial capital of Latin America. During the last 25 years, it has taken on a much greater international flavor and cemented its place as a hub of finance, trade and transportation. The metropolitan area's airports have played a big role in this growth.

If a desire to see the world helped entice a young Hank Cintron to sign up for military service, it's a good bet that he wasn't disappointed. He joined the Army from an ROTC program at the University of Puerto Rico at age 21 in 1975, and by the time he retired as a lieutenant colonel two decades later, he had worked everywhere from Venezuela and Nicaragua to Germany and Kuwait.

Stand in a trout stream holding a fly rod for as many hours and days as the patience of your partner back home and the indulgence of your boss, employees or stockholders will permit. Sooner or later, you'll catch a spotted porpoise of a fish so improbably outsized for the shallow confines of the freshwater creek where it swims that you won't believe it.

Cessna was late to the very light jet party. When the company first announced the Citation Mustang, in 2002, it refused to call it a light jet. Cessna CEO Jack Pelton to this day refuses to label the airplane a VLJ and instead describes it as a "downward defense of the product line."

Ask a pilot what keeps an airplane in the sky and he'll most likely talk about the forces of lift, thrust, gravity and drag; power-to-weight ratios; and possibly "airfoils"-the word used to describe the wings' shape. Or maybe he'll answer simply, "Your credit card." Either way, it's not much comfort when you're eight miles above terra firma with no visible means of support.

In an ideal world, you'd have it all-a Wi-Fi Internet connection, e-mail access on your BlackBerry, four bars of signal strength on your cellphone and 200 channels of satellite television on a big, flat high-definition screen, all from the comfort of your seat in the cabin. In short, you'd have technologies that would make your time in the air more like your time on the ground.

Is it safe to use cellphones and other personal electronics on airplanes?
It depends on whom you ask, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say that the cacophony of electronic "noise" emitted by portable devices brought onboard by passengers indeed can cause dangerous interference with navigation sensors in the cockpit.